Robert McFarland’s horse was given a parking ticket under the heading, “Vehicle Description: Brown Horse”.
A motorist who received a ticket in an NCP car park, despite returning to her car an hour early, was told the attendant had fined her because he had “reasonable cause to think she would stay longer than the four hours for which she had paid”.

Under the heading Gulls ‘Strangled’ In Front Of Staff, the Bournemouth Daily Echo reports:

STAFF at offices in Bournemouth were left horrified and in tears after watching three seagull chicks killed in front of them because they were deemed a health and safety risk.
The seagull family lived on the roof of Harold G Walker solicitors in Oxford Road, Bournemouth, and the young chicks had become favourites among staff in surrounding buildings.

Apparently members of the Crown Prosecution Service were watching too.
The story was also taken up by the Law Society Gazette and RollOnFriday (the latter writes ‘No-one mention the hawk in Broadgate’, but that would be the perfect antidote, of course).

The commenters on the Daily Echo are incensed and will not use the services of Harold G Walker in future. One writes (my emphasis):

What Harold Walker has failed to grasp is the impact on the people who have witnessed this incident as it was carried out in an unprofessional manner. ProKill are incorrest to quote that they followed the guidelines as I would like to know where DEFRA state that you are allowed to stamp on a birds head. I would like to add that we are not talking once ,but for several moments so death did not come quickly to the creature, and to add insult to injury to wave at the staff who had come out of their offices in shock is just unbelievable.

This vocabulary doesn’t seem familiar to me. Go to the Obergericht, click on Dolmetscherwesen and then on Strafrechtsterminologie der Bundeskanzlei (D, F, I, E). It can’t be copied, but here’s one entry, scanned, to give an impression (scanned, OCR’d but not spellchecked for the various languages):

On the subject of Swiss German, Jens Wiese at Blogwiese has just announced that he has reached the end of his topic. At the moment he is rehashing old topics. He says that he often gets queries and they are all words he has already discussed. He still writes a weekly column in a couple of Swiss newspapers.

The Mail on Sunday reports that Pagan inmates are given a day off from work for Halloween.

Prison Service bosses have instructed staff to grant the convicts, who include Devil worshippers and Satanists, special privileges on Tuesday.
While fellow prisoners sew mail bags and undertake other jail work, the Pagans will be allowed to celebrate their ‘holiday’.
They can use certain artefacts, including rune stones, flexible twigs and hoodless robes, provided they are kept in their cells or worn during communal worship. Robes with hoods are banned for ‘security reasons’, however.

Obviously they will not be able to wear this Tchibo hoodie (Kapuzinerjacke), then.

The Home Office papers reveal that Pagans can choose a day off work on two dates from eight of their festivals each year.
These include the Spring Equinox on March 20, the Midsummer Solstice on June 21 and Hallowe’en – the Samhain, or Summer’s End, as it was known in Celtic times – on October 31. Christian prisoners are allowed three days off – on Good Friday, Easter Day and Christmas Day.
Muslims are entitled to the most time off – 26 days to pray, including the fast of Ramadan. Buddhists get three days, Hindus ten and Jews seven.

I’ve mentioned Jerry (Gerold) Harfst’s book Die Besondere Übersetzungshilfe before , but now I can present some pages from it to show what it’s like.

The book is a criminal law glossary divided into three sections: in the first, the German terms are arranged by order of paragraph number: that is, first comes the Betäubungsmittelgesetz with entries from 1 to 39, then the Jugendgerichtsgesetz, Ordnungswidrigkeitengesetz, Strafgesetzbuch, Strafprozessordnung, Strafvollzugsgesetz, Straßenverkehrsgesetz, Straßenverkehrsordnung, and Waffengesetz.

Second comes a German-English glossary, and third an English-German glossary. In each of these, the section numbers are given in the margin.

Thus an interpreter in court might want to use the section arranged by paragraph numbers, for instance in a case about drugs.

This is a curious image for electronic tagging / monitoring. Surely the purpose of ringing a pigeon is different from the purpose of ringing Martha Stewart?

It appears that Ms Stewart, who is poised to relaunch her career with two television shows, has been cheating a little on the rules of her confinement. The result of this: the home confinement stage of her original sentence will no longer end on 8 August and has instead been extended by three weeks.